Blunt rips Obamacare failure

President Barack Obama gestures as he speaks about his signature health care law, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2013, in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington. Again and again, Obama shouldered the blame for his botched health care rollout in unusually blunt terms — a step many of his critics contend was long overdue.
Photo by The Associated Press.

President Barack Obama said Thursday there’s no doubt that millions of Americans are frustrated about receiving cancellation notices from their health insurance companies, especially when the president promised they could keep their health insurance from the individual market if they liked it.

“The bottom line is people had insurance that they thought met their needs and they could afford to pay for,” said U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. “Now they’re finding out that the insurance available to them (through the health insurance marketplace) is more expensive than they need, and in many cases has lots of elements to it that they know they don’t need.”

Obama said the cancellation notices are currently one of two issues with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the other being making sure the marketplace website, healthcare.gov, works the ways it’s supposed to.

“It’s fair to say that improvements will be noticeable,” Obama said.

He said state insurance commissioners will continue to have the power to decide what plans can and can’t be sold in their states.

Chris Cline, Missouri’s Insurance department spokesman, said the department is reviewing today’s announcement and the impact it will have on insurance companies and Missouri consumers.

Blunt believes Obama’s solutions are “too little, too late,” and “will never be as easy as they sound.”

“There’s lots of obstacles still in the way and even if you got over all those obstacles, you’d be back to the exact same problem a year from now,” Blunt said.

He said he will continue to fight the Affordable Care Act, a law that he calls an “Obamacare train wreck.”

“I still think there will be a point when the Administration looks back to the good ol’ days when the only problem they had was trying to explain why the website wouldn’t work, as opposed to trying to explain why this structure just simply won’t work,” he said. “When the president now decides that he’s going to redefine policies and try to make the law agree with what he over and over again said it would do, it creates a big problem.”

U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, believes the ACA needs to be changed through the legislative process.

“We cannot count on another presidential promise to undo the damage to our health care system, but instead must allow the elected representatives of the American people to do that,” he said.